Machine
by Tolakasa
Summary: Impalaverse, season 6. The car knew before they did. Castiel just doesn't understand how.


**Machine**

It's the car that gives him the first hint.

This car saved the world, because to do otherwise would have meant letting Dean die. The car tolerates whatever—and whoever—Dean does, so long as it doesn't put Dean at risk.

And now the car suddenly doesn't like Sam.

Sam's deprecating remarks (_I get a pass because I'm his brother, I'm pretty sure she would've killed me already otherwise_) aside, the car is fiercely protective of him, because to allow damage to Sam is to damage Dean, and _all_ this car cares about is Dean's welfare. Castiel knows what happened between the Impala and Lisa, and the woman was no real threat, not even to Dean's mental health. Dean's psyche was a wreck _long_ before Lisa came back into his life. Before he went to Hell, for that matter.

If the apocalypse has done anything to the Impala, it should be to make her less likely to conceal what she is. She's proven every legend of pure spirits true. She took on Lucifer and won. There's not an entity in the universe that wouldn't brag a little about that accomplishment.

And yet now, when Sam is around her, she might as well be another car. There are no electronic twitches, no manipulations of the doors and windows, and she will not drive herself.

It cannot be fear. She's a pure spirit, never corrupted by flesh. She's the one who made Lucifer stumble. Not Sam, not Dean, not Michael, not God. Anyone who can stand up to Lucifer, flesh or metal, is not going to be intimidated by a mere resurrected man. Not when she's already lived through several of his prior resurrections.

When Sam's not near, when it's just the car and Dean—and Castiel, of course, because even if Dean isn't always aware of his presence, _she_ most certainly is—the car is as she always has been. She's a little friendlier to him these days, perhaps because he healed Dean after the terrible beating he took at Lucifer's hands; she no longer ignores him, though Castiel is still not certain that the tiny little growl, unheard by humans, is supposed to be a politegreeting and not some kind of warning.

Yet when Sam is around, even if he's not _in_ the car, she could be any other hunk of metal on the streets, all that power—all that _sentience_—hidden even from the eyes of angels. To bury her power so completely—to even _consider_ hiding that much power—

It's the first sign that something is wrong, that he—how would Dean say it?—fucked up. _Really_ fucked up.

It's not like he didn't know that pulling Sam out of the Cage would have consequences. _Everything_ has consequences, and frankly, when the Winchesters are involved, the consequences tend to be spectacular.

It seems like such a minor thing, but Castiel knows that it's a sign of something deeper, knows it the way he knew that siding with the Winchesters against Heaven and Hell was the right thing to do. In his gut, as Dean would say, though what one's intestines have to do with moral decisions, Castiel is still uncertain.

Then Sam and Dean wind up on the wrong side of Veritas, and Dean summons him in a panic. Castiel performs the examination because he's as confused as Dean—and then he just stands there, staring at the thing tied to the chair.

So this is the problem.

It would seem that Dean's car has a soul and Dean's brother does not.

Dean is unhappy—with Castiel's inability to fix the situation, with Sam's complete and total uncaring now laid bare—but his focus is on Sam, as if somehow Sam can _learn_ to have a soul again. Castiel leaves them, but only to go to where the Impala is parked. He takes only enough care to make sure Dean can't see him.

He chooses to remain invisible to mortals, but stands close. _Not_ directly in front of her, however; if he does that, she can easily accelerate and hit him. He has learned his lesson on _that_ matter. "You knew," he says to the car. "You knew before we did. How?"

Castiel expects a response, if there is one, to come as a thought, nothing more. The car's physical form is not equipped for speech, and she demonstrated in no uncertain terms that she does not _want_ a voice. Despite his explosion and subsequent resurrection, a few feathers still ache when he thinks about that incident.

Instead, shadows gather around the car, shadows that drift along the currents of air like a drop of blood dispersing in water, violating every law of light, until they thicken and become _her_. Clearly not a woman, but woman-shaped, all black and silver and glowing eyes. The dark, too-slender fingers of one hand trail along the hood of the car, maintaining contact with it at all times. Hair the same metallic color as the bumpers tumbles down her back as shadows form ragged veils of mist from crown to feet, dripping from her arms, black cobwebs swaying in a nonexistent breeze.

No demon or angel could create this. It's a form that could only come out of the immeasurable depths of a human imagination—and Castiel realizes abruptly that that is _exactly_ what it is. This secondary appearance of the Impala—the shape of her soul, as it were—was plucked from Lisa's mind. Lisa had imagined her as a rival for Dean's affections, and so the Impala—the _inner_ Impala—chose to become one.

The appearance of a soul is usually dictated by the flesh—or whatever—that houses it. To _change_ that inner aspect, even for a few moments, speaks of either severe psychological damage or incredible power.

All things considered, Castiel chooses to err on the side of "power."

The way she maintains careful contact with the car's metal skin speaks of _some_ limitations—this is probably the car's equivalent of astral projection—but even the most basic such projection requires an immense amount of power, and there is nothing _basic_ about the apparition before him. She had been in storage when she began tormenting Lisa. Like a human in a coma, perhaps, not as connected to the corporeal, freer to manipulate her self-image? A matter for meditation, when he has the time for such things again.

"You knew about Sam," he repeats.

"It's not Sammy," she says.

"Yes, but how did you _know?_"

She looks away, her headlight eyes dimmed, chrome nails digging into a fisted hand. Emotion, definitely, but which? Sadness? Grief? Pure spirits do not fear, but they may certainly grieve; grief is pure in way that fear is not. "I always know them."

An answer, and yet not. "_How_ do you know them?" he persists. If he knows what it was that let the Impala sense Sam's—issue—then perhaps he can find a way to fix it. Perhaps she will even have a few thoughts on the matter. What an angel cannot accomplish, a pure spirit may. "I know you're attuned to Dean, but Sam— _How_ could you possibly know?"

Her expression is a feminized, chrome-and-ebony duplicate of the one Dean gives him when Dean thinks he's being particularly dense. "Sammy was _born_ here," she says, pointedly tapping a long fingernail on the car.

A tie of blood? But that makes even less sense. If she is tied by blood to Sam, then why is she so attached to Dean? "Dean wasn't," he points out.

Her head snaps up, the eyes brightly fierce. "Dean is _mine_," she snarls, all possessiveness and hostility. "He has been since John and Mary brought him to me. He will _always_ be mine."

There comes a time when even an angel must plead ignorance. "I don't understand," Castiel says helplessly. "If your bond is with Dean, how can you know—"

"It threatened me," she interrupts. "Sammy's shell _threatened_ me."

Considering how often she's slammed Sam in her doors, Castiel isn't actually surprised by that. He's frankly surprised it doesn't happen more often—playfully, of course, nothing serious, like the way Dean used to threaten Sam about his perpetual failure to fetch the proper dessert.

Castiel suspects he will not hear that teasing again for some time.

"You don't understand," she says fiercely, as if she heard his thoughts—and perhaps she did; perhaps eavesdropping on an angel's brain isn't outside her reach. "It threatened to make Dean _desert_ me. It said it could convince Dean to _junk me_. Sammy knows better. Sammy loves me in his own way. He's just not _mine_."

A lesser relationship, then, still important, but less profound—perhaps something similar to the difference between his own bond with Dean and his bond to Sam. As he is now, Sam—or whatever one chooses to call the soulless husk who is currently out looking for a compliant woman for the night—could never hold up his end of that relationship.

Perhaps there are things that angels simply aren't _meant_ to understand.

But Castiel understands enough to know that _nothing_ would make Dean give the Impala up. If there were, he would have done it by now. Stray bits of his vessel's knowledge have told Castiel that, whispering of the worldly problems such an old car causes—things like _gas-guzzler_ and _high-maintenance_ and _too conspicuous_. "Dean would never—"

Something akin to lightning flashes in those inhuman eyes.

The realization staggers him.

Dean would never leave her—under _normal_ circumstances. But right now, Dean _isn't_ normal. Not even _Dean_ normal, which even Castiel knows is quite a different standard from that of the rest of the world. Dean is barely holding things together. He's reeling from Sam's resurrection and subsequent soullessness, from discovering the Campbells, from losing Lisa and Ben. Dean has always been so resilient—so _apparently_ resilient, Castiel corrects himself—that it's easy to forget just how much he's been through, to forget just how fragile he is beneath all that bluster.

If only he'd listened to Sam's prayers. If only he'd _ensured_ that Dean's past couldn't catch up with him. The man had taken on Lucifer _and_ Michael armed with nothing but alcohol, sarcasm, and a sentient car. He deserved better. What would it have cost to protect him? A few moments of time, a splash or two of power?

"Why didn't you tell Dean?"

She looks even more uncomfortable, if such a thing is possible. "I cannot," she says finally, the inhuman eyes dimmed, the voice betraying her pain. "It—happens. The bond is _too_ strong."

A matter of degrees, as so many of these things are. Mortals require water to survive, but drown with appalling frequency; they tamed fire, and still die by the hundreds in conflagrations.

"I can reach his dreams, sometimes," she continues softly, a bit wistfully. "Not often. Others are easier, but Sammy... It doesn't sleep. It doesn't dream."

So she could not _tell_ Dean, and Sam...is not her _Sammy_ at the moment. "Why didn't you try to tell me?" He has been here more than Sam and Dean know. The world has changed, but there are a few things of which Castiel is still certain, and one of those is that the Impala _always_ knows when he's around. No mere angel has the power to confound a pure spirit. "Why did you not appear to me when I was here earlier?"

The glare she gives him could turn Heaven to Hell.

Of course. _He_ is not hers, and therefore he is irrelevant. This must be a trait of cars, this failure to recognize the extended relationships of mankind. That she can even comprehend the importance of Dean's bond with Sam might be as great a leap for a car as rebellion for an angel.

"I brought Dean back from Hell," he points out. "Does that earn me _no_ favor from you?"

"You left Sammy there." The words are sharp, bordering on hateful.

He left Sam—her Sammy—in Hell. Unintentionally, of course, but it happened nevertheless. And that threatens Dean. Not a physical threat—that thing with no soul would not have survived this long in the human world without learning to observe society's rules, to pretend caring—but to Dean's heart and mind.

The Impala has no patience with threats to Dean. No matter who creates them.

Like that, the veils dissipate into the night wind, and the apparition is gone.

"I will get him back," Castiel says, and the wipers flick, once, skeptically. "I will find a way."

_**the end**_


End file.
